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New study challenges timeline
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Re: New study challenges timeline
Dec 05, 2012, 08:57
Littlestone wrote:
VBB wrote:
The former chair of the Avebury Society Alastair Service made the point in print about Silbury being white almost twenty years before this website existed, Foster made the same point in relation to Avebury in the 1920s, the point was already old even then, made in relation to barrows on Salisbury Plain and near Dorchester in the 19th century.


Fair doos... but the point, surely, is whether those observations were ever given much credence at the time (or for that matter for several decades afterwards) by the established archeo community. Remember, it’s within (some of) our lifetimes that Atkinson was calling the builders of Silbury ‘howling barbarians’.

It’s probably fair to say that our present, more ‘receptive’ way of thinking, has created a far more open-minded approach to archaeological research - and that has to be the value of forums such as this - always pushing at the boundaries slightly.


I expend rather a lot of energy promoting that given accessibility to learned argument the public can bring a wealth of personal and professional experience from all walks of life to bear on archaeological thought dominated by career academics and heritage professionals (that never having done anything else can be somewhat limited in their vision of what life is about); but that argument is somewhat undermined by tma masquerading such as the above examples as unquestionable fact without rigour or references, and furthermore as we all know, behaving in a fashion that encourages the impression that public enthusiasts are a rabble of egotistical loose cannons that converse as if holding a tired closing time pub conversation.

Reminds me of home when I was a kid, but it don’t suit everyone!
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